[quote who="=Outlaw=" reply="23" id="2565190"]
Quoting Tasunke, reply 17
"If however, we went the route of charging 1 essence every time the shard is used ... then I fear it will break the game. If you have too much essence, its a war of attrition, and if you have too little essence, the option will be impossible to use."
Not sure what you are trying to say is wrong with this. Seems to be the modus operandi of all strategy games. If you have resources, you are able to fight it out and win, and if don't have them, you suffer.
See, what I mean is that, if "Fireball" required 1 fire node, and you had to spend 1 essence to "enchant" the fire node, and you Cast the Fireball spell 20 times, you LOSE 20 essence. Thats potentially 2 levels of stats immediately lost, if not MORE.
Basically, changing for a one time cost of essence, that is fine. But every time you cast the spell? impossible to balance. These are temporary spells that are meant to cost Mana, not essence.
Anyways ... you should really only be fighting for resources in the Late game and Later mid-game (imho). I mean, if you sacrificed your Melee ability and your Nation's ability for the sake of casting spells, then you should be able to research and cast spells for about half of the game without having to hunt down the proper shard (imho). Of course shards can give bonuses, better spells, but it shouldnt' be impossible to use your mana-class without the proper shard, or else everyone will buy Multiple Magic Books.(if not all, they only 5 points)
And yes, someone mentioned that alternatively you could choose your book after finding the shard, and while a possibility, Im not sure its really adressing the right problem.[/quote]
Are you kidding ? Essence is just too precious to use it this way. You just can't spend it that way, it's too expensive for too few results. Magic won't ever be used if it work that way.
I was thinking about the spell points : instead of researching a new spell you could use some spell points (maybe 100) it changes the kind of a shard and have a fair chance to get a quest "bring some virgins to the dragon shard or it will try to kill you".
EDIT: or it could be a mini-game : each time you try to change the kind of a shard, it would become unavailable, and the four elements would be struggling inside it. You can use how many spell points you want to support the element you need. Each turn the game check if an element will take advantage. Each turn you spell points involved are used if the shard isn't of the kind you support. It could even lead to some tactical battle where your armies could be bought with spell points : 50 spell points ? You get 3 fairies, a hell hound and a minautore to fight against the fire waves of enemies. Or why not a tower defense game ?
Well ...
